The EP Quadruple Project is a project in the Digital Innovation Group that has the goal of annotating Embryo Project articles by creating annotations that reflect the relationships between articles similar to the relationships that were originally developed for the Embryo Project. The Embryo Project is an online encyclopedia of embryology that aims to document embryo research in the broadest possible way [Maienschein and Laubichler 2009]. Articles in the Embryo Projects “are written and marked up in such a way that they help populating the database with additional objects that have interesting and relevant relationships to the object of the entry” [Maienschein and Laubichler 2009, p. 11]. For example, there exists an article about Hans Spemann that mentions Theodor Boveri and Wilhelm Röntgen. The marked up article has a relationship to Boveri as well as to Röntgen. However, while an entry for Boveri exists, there is no article about Röntgen. By creating a relationship between Spemann and Röntgen, additional “interesting” information is stored and available for use. One motivation for creating and storing such relationships was to be able to easily answer questions such as “Who was a student of whom? ” or “Who worked at a particular place? With [what] particular organisms? ” [Maienschein and Laubichler 2009, p. 9]. 

To learn more about the Embryo Project go to http://embryo.asu.edu/.

References

Maienschein, Jane and Manfred D. Laubichler. 2009. “The Embryo Project: An Integrated Approach to History, Practices, and Social Contexts of Embryo Research.” Journal of the History of Biology 43 (1): 1–16.